Book of the Day: Robert Mills and the architecture of a new nation

Blanche Marsh, Robert Mills: Architect in South Carolina (Columbia: The R.L. Bryan Company, 1970. Stated 1st ed, 1st printing). LOC 72-125882. Quarto. 20 x 28 cm. xi; 178 pp. Profusely illustrated in black-and-white. Original orange cloth and unclipped, near fine,  pictorial dust jacket, a little wear at the right front edge of the dustjacket HBB price: $30 obo.

A South Carolina native, Robert Mills (1781-1855) was never just a South Carolina architect. He was present at the creation of the United States’ neoclassical style of governmental buildings, and was a major influence on American architecture for half a century.

After graduating from the College of Charleston, Mills made his way to the under-construction federal city of Washington. He studied under, and worked with, White House architect James Hoban in the structure’s building. He so impressed incoming President Thomas Jefferson that he spent two years living at Monticello and studying in the statesman’s library.

19-century American architects went where the work was; for Mills’ early career, that was the mid-Atlantic states. He practiced for a time in Philadelphia, then Baltimore. He produced everything from prisons to churches to canals to monuments. Mills designed the US Patent Office and the US Treasury, and won the competition for the Washington Monument, living to see it half-completed.

In 1820 he called named acting commissioner of public works in South Carolina, and superintendent of public buildings in 1823.  During his home stay he designed numerous commercial and public structures, including eighteen county courthouses, as well as private homes for the planter class, and a canal. His Poinsett Bridge (1820) for a new road connecting Greenville, SC and Asheville, NC, stands to this day, an elegant gothic design executed in native stone.

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